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Protagoras comments on How is your mind different from everyone else's? - Less Wrong
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I'm not sure how common or rare this is, but the visual images I recall are stunningly lacking in detail. For example, in the case of people, even with someone I know very well, it is rare for me to be able to report so much as their hair color on the basis of the mental image I call up when I try to think of them. I don't seem to have any unusual difficulty recognizing people, or any tendency to confuse my various mental images with one another, and the mental images don't seem incomplete until I start thinking about questions like how to describe them. I'm sure I would be completely useless to a police sketch artist if I were ever a witness to a crime.
I have 5 distinct experiences of vision. They are each qualitatively very different.
When my eyes are open, Static is still present, but in most cases my brain edits it out and reports only Seeing. When I am looking at a solid color or just paying careful attention it is clear Static is still present. I did not realize this before making an effort to investigate what I am actually Seeing.
Until I read Yvain's Generalizing from One Example post I believed that what I'm calling Imagination is what everyone did when they said they were visualizing. I only have Mental Imagery rarely: sometimes when on the boundary of sleeping and waking or after minutes of effort during meditation. These images are distinct and lasting enough to, say, read about half a line of text from a Mental Image of a page of a book. My memories of the experience of Mental Imagery and of the experience of images seen while dreaming seem to feel the same. I have not been able to focus on these long enough to tell if they have background Static, as paying much attention to them leads directly to their disappearance and the realization that I am now seeing Static and Eddies while looking at the back of my eyelids.
"Static" might be visual snow. I have it, and in my case it's probably due to lots of staring at computer monitors over the years.
The description of visual noise on Wikipedia describes my "Static" fairly accurately.
Your descriptions of 'static' and 'eddies and afterimage' match my younger experiences, and I just realized that I no longer have these visual phenomena. I used to see them as vivid blue and red dots when I closed my eyes.
I don't know if this is fair, because it's not me, but a family member of mine credibly claims to have no conscious visual memory. For example, when she drives down a highway which she has driven many times before, she doesn't automatically recognize the different parts of the highway as I do, without effort; she has to remember specific facts about where things are (like, I take exit 102 to get to place X, which is after a radio tower and then a curve) and then apply those facts to know where she is. She cannot picture her house in her head; she recognizes it by remembering salient features of its exterior. In contrast, her semantic memory and general cognitive ability is exceptional.
Some tasks, like playing games or solving problems that lean on visual and spatial imagination (e.g. the IQ test problems where you fold shapes up) are very difficult for her, although some of those can also be hacked around by remembering relationships (the dot is on the side clockwise from the square, etc.) According to her, she didn't even realize that other people had this capability in a different way until she was college-age or so.
Personally, I have what I think is above-average visual and spatial imagery -- I play chess and see the pieces moving in my head, I read fiction and imagine the settings and characters, and so on. I guess it takes all sorts.
I do this too, but only for faces. I have detailed mental images of things like buildings and circuit diagrams, but I don't have good mental pictures of people's faces. I don't have too much trouble recognizing people (though I suspect I am below-average at it), but I can't visualize or describe anyone's face when I'm not near them.
Likewise, when I'm reading fiction, I don't have clear mental pictures of what the characters' faces look like.
I have very limited ability to visualize images or to imagine/remember sounds.
The weird thing is that sometimes with fiction, I'll feel as though I know what a character looks like, even though I can't visualize it. This is strong with Tolkien (the movie hobbits were wrong, wrong, wrong), while with Bujold, I simply have no idea what the characters look like. Having a sensory experience with fiction is so rare it seems like a miracle.
At the same time, if fiction has too few sensory cues, I'm apt to feel disconnected and uninterested. This is especially notable with military science fiction-- and it may be related to my having more problems with telling people apart if they're wearing uniforms.
I've wondered if what fiction people like has something to do with brainwave similarities between the author and the readers.
So they were, and Galadriel was even more wrong.
It may be the reverse spirit of the post, but voted up for putting to words what I've best said as "I can't describe person X, but if you have them in a crowd I can find them."
I have this too, though I've moderated it some by explicitly practicing the skill. I essentially never see people's faces when visualizing what they're doing, nor when I'm dreaming.
How did you practice it?
I'd already learned that, to be able to remember's people's names later, I had to make an actual effort to repeat their name to myself while I was looking at them. So, I then started consciously trying to notice details about people's appearance when I first met them - what's their hair color, what color are their eyes, what are they wearing and carrying. Eventually, this effort became a habit. Now, I usually do this automatically when I first meet someone, and I remember more of those details.
Thank you! I will try doing that from now on.
As to what they're wearing and carrying, I'm practising to avoid relying on this too much now. I've gotten into trouble before by remembering people by what they're wearing when I'm introduced to them instead of by their faces. :/